New Phone Ap Exposes Home Addresses of Legal Gun Owners

Are you an evil gun owner whose “gun religion” requires “live child sacrifices” to appease your gun god? Well now there is a smart phone ap to expose your home address to the world.

Gun Geo Marker is now available for anti-gun smart phone users to upload the home address of gun owners to a database created to mark “dangerous guns and gun owners.”

The ap was developed by University of California San Diego lecturer and anti-gun hobbyist Brett Stalbaum who claims that his project is meant to track “irresponsible” gun owners. But reading his ap website tends to affirm that Stalbaum thinks all gun owners are irresponsible–as with the “gun religion” comment.

As Stalbaum explains on the ap’s webpage, “Yes, I guess this is the same as ‘publicly geotag[ing] homes of people believed to belong to a particular religion.’ True enough, if your religion requires live child sacrifices to appease a cold, tubular god.”

The phone ap is explained as a tool to make communities safer.

“The Gun Geo Marker operates very simply, letting parents and community members mark, or geolocate, sites associated with potentially unsafe guns and gun owners. These locations are typically the homes or businesses of suspected unsafe gun owners, but might also be public lands or other locations where guns are not handled safely, or situations where proper rights to own or use any particular type of firearm may not exist.”

But there are no real guidelines on what makes an “irresponsible gun owner,” and it is plain that the ap is easily used for purposes of harassment.

One commenter named Dave points out how the ap can be used maliciously, even by criminals looking for an easy mark.

This creates prime territory for an extremist witch hunt, but worse, ready information for tech-savvy criminals. If I were seeking a gun why wouldn’t I simply cross-reference the addresses listed with Spokeo information, find a female target and pay a visit? Worse, if one house is armed and the next is not, and I’m looking for an easy target, who do I choose? Takes 5 minutes. This will be abused, it’s irresponsible and frankly, disturbing.

But on the ap’s Google Play store page, all the reviews that take the time to actually review the technical–as opposed to the political–aspects of the ap note that it frequently crashes and is poorly designed. There isn’t one review that praises its technical features. It appears the politics of the issue were more important than programming for ap creator Stalbaum.

It is unclear how this ap would be affected by the privacy laws in some states where publishing gun owners’ addresses is frowned upon. Readers may recall the incident last year when a New York newspaper tried to get various county governments of the State of New York to give them the home addresses of all licensed gun owners. Eventually the state passed a law prohibiting the release of such information. New York isn’t the only state that prohibits the release of such records, either.

It looks as if the app doesn’t work very well. That notwithstanding, there is another way criminals can use such a database. Once such an app is debugged, criminals can target homes without firearms (knowing the homeowner cannot shoot back). The app developer may want to ponder this a little more.

sshiell

They ought to distribute the app for free to anyone with a felony conviction.

DCox

Please help me spread the word about this petition to have Google Play remove the app

I suggest another app. An app that shows the address of known anti-gun protesters.

jim_m

I’d love the app that shows people who are both anti-gun protesters and gun owners. Of course we could just ask for an app to show the homes of dem politicians.

Paul Hooson

This is an outrageous invasion of the privacy of legal gun owners, and possibly sets them up for burglaries and crime. A number of concealed gun permit owners may carry large amounts of money, and this also sets these persons up for possible crimes as well.

http://www.traveLightgame.com/ ljcarolyne

Well – guess they better stay away from some homes, cause the gun owner may be “HOME ALONE” AND HE/SHE CAN USE MUCH MORE THAN A GUN. . . The gun will just finish the would be attacker off, GRRRRRRRRRRRR! haha NEXT!

Retired military

THe gun owner can then be put on trial as a white Hispanic.

Retired military

Someone should make an app that publicizes addresses of local politicians. Everyone from the Mayor on down to the local dog catcher.

http://www.traveLightgame.com/ ljcarolyne

Thanks to Snowden we know the jigs us. Just watch your back. . .with this Usurper!

Neo

This smells of McCarthyism.

I’m just confused if it’s Joe McCarthy or Charlie McCarthy.

Nisa Taft

I visited the site of the app but it doesn’t work fittingly. __________________________________________________________________